Decision-Making Resources for Healthcare Professionals

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ): Health Care Innovations Exchange aims to increase awareness of innovative strategies and activities among healthcare providers promptly. Every day, healthcare practitioners find better and more effective ways of delivering healthcare. However, the diffusion of their innovative ideas is slow and rarely reaches beyond institutional walls or across healthcare settings (for example, from hospitals to nursing homes or private physician practices to community health clinics). As a result, healthcare providers unnecessarily duplicate each other's efforts.

For more than 30 years, the American Academy on Communication in Healthcare (AACH) has been at the forefront of research and teaching relationship-centered healthcare communication. If you are looking for ways to improve patient safety, interdisciplinary teamwork, and patient satisfaction scores or just want to work on individual communication skills, AACH can help.

Ask Me 3® is an educational program that encourages patients and families to ask three specific questions of their providers to better understand their health conditions and what they need to do to stay healthy. Designed by health literacy experts, Ask Me 3 is intended to help patients become more active members of their healthcare team and provide a critical platform to improve communications between patients, families, and healthcare professionals.

For more than 20 years, the Dartmouth Atlas Project has documented glaring variations in how medical resources are distributed and used in the United States. The project uses Medicare data to provide comprehensive information and analysis about national, regional, and local markets and individual hospitals and their affiliated physicians.

Health Dialog works with health plans and employers to improve the quality of care and reduce the costs of healthcare by enhancing the quality of patient-physician dialogs.

Healthwise is a global provider of health information, decision support tools, behavior change assistance, and personal care planning for the top health plans, care management companies, hospitals, and consumer health portals.

For over two decades, the Informed Medical Decisions Foundation has been working to advance shared decision-making through research, policy, clinical models, and patient decision aids. They believe that the only way to ensure high-quality medical decisions is for a fully informed patient to participate in a shared decision-making process with their healthcare provider.

Institute for Healthcare Communication (IHC), an independent nonprofit based in New Haven, CT, has been designing and conducting accredited communication skills training since 1987. IHC's experiential train-the-trainer programs help clinicians, non-clinical support staff, and entire healthcare teams communicate more effectively with patients, families and one another.

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement, an independent not-for-profit organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a leading innovator, convener, partner, and driver of results in health and healthcare improvement worldwide. At our core, we believe everyone should get the best care and health possible. This passionate belief fuels our mission to improve health and healthcare.

The mission of IISDM is to support, unite and develop the interdisciplinary study of human decision-making throughout the academic and policy landscape at NYU – linking the study of decision-making from the level of neurons to the level of social policy.

The International Patient Decision Aid Standards (IPDAS) Collaboration is a group of researchers, practitioners and stakeholders from around the world that was established in 2003 to enhance the quality and effectiveness of patient decision aid by establishing a shared evidence-informed framework with a set of criteria for improving their content, development, implementation, and evaluation.

The HDSC is committed to improving the quality of decisions made by patients and healthcare providers. The HDSC is involved in developing, implementing, and evaluating decision aids and quality measures to support shared decision-making in medical encounters.

Minimally disruptive medicine (MDM) seeks to advance patient goals for health, healthcare, and life, using effective care programs designed and implemented in a manner that respects the capacity of patients and caregivers and minimizes the burden of treatment – the healthcare footprint – the care program imposes on their lives.

The National Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making in Healthcare (NCCD) is funded by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) under the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) Program, which seeks to support improvements in the quality, safety and efficiency of health care through advanced information technology. NCCD is a consortium of many institutions led by The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).

The Ottawa Hospital Decision Centre (OHDeC) website includes links to decision aids, including the Ottawa Personal Decision Guide©, online training, shared decision-making implementation toolkits, evaluation measurement tools and research reviews.

The Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM) improves health outcomes through the advancement of proactive, systematic approaches to clinical decision-making and policy formation in healthcare by providing a scholarly forum that connects and educates researchers, providers, policy-makers, and the public.

Use Visualizing Health from the University of Michigan to create graphics to communicate health data to your patients.